The next few days were a whirlwind of fittings and floral arrangements, a storm of feminine preoccupation I was expected to float through with a serene smile. As I stood for what felt like the thousandth time while Madame Renée fussed with the hem of my ballgown, my mind drifted away from the pins and tulle. It wandered back, not to my past life as Sol, but to the long, strange road that had brought me to this moment—a woman living a triple life in a time that was not her own.
Adapting to 1896 wasn't like flipping a switch. It was a slow, often painful, process of sanding down my modern edges so I wouldn't snag on the fabric of this rigid society. The first few years after my memories awoke were the hardest. I'd see a problem—a simple sanitation issue in the kitchen, a hopelessly inefficient accounting method—and my mind would instantly fire off a perfect, modern solution. The words would be on my tongue, desperate to get out.
But I learned, quickly and harshly, that a little girl spouting advanced concepts wasn't seen as clever. She was seen as possessed. Or a liar. I had to swallow my knowledge whole, let it burn in my stomach, and learn the art of silence.
My salvation, ironically, came from my father.
I was twelve. I'd been listening to him rage for weeks about a rival family undercutting his sugar shipments by using a faster, but more dangerous, sea route. One afternoon, alone in his study, I'd been looking at his maps. Without thinking, I took a piece of tracing paper and charted a new route myself, one that used the coastal currents to shave off time without risking the treacherous reefs. It was basic logistics, something any modern shipping company would software-calculate in seconds.
I'd left it on his desk, forgotten about it. That evening, he summoned me. He held the paper in his hand, his expression unreadable.
"Did you draw this?" he asked, his voice low.
I froze, my heart hammering. I'd been caught. I'm in trouble. "Yes, Papa," I whispered, staring at the floor.
There was a long silence. Then, he said, "Look at me, Ines."
I forced myself to meet his eyes. To my astonishment, I didn't see anger. I saw intense, blazing curiosity.
"Explain it to me."
So I did. Haltingly at first, then with more confidence, I explained the currents, the estimated time saved, the avoidance of the rocky shallows. He listened without interrupting, his eyes never leaving my face.
When I finished, he leaned back in his chair. "And where did you learn of such things?"
This was the dangerous part. I couldn't tell him about shipping software and GPS. I looked down, weaving a lie with threads of truth. "I… I listen when the sailors talk at the harbor, Papa. And I look at your maps. I just… I just put the pieces together."
He knew it was an incomplete answer. A twelve-year-old girl, even an ilustrada, didn't learn advanced navigation from listening to dockhands. But he saw the brilliance in the idea, not the impossibility of its source.
He didn't praise me. Instead, he said, "Do not ever speak of this to anyone. Not your mother. Not your friends. Do you understand? The world is not kind to women who think like men."
It was the first real advice he'd ever given me that acknowledged I could think like a man. It was a warning, but it was also an acknowledgment.
A week later, a set of boy's clothes appeared on the corner desk in his study. "If you are to have thoughts, they need a voice that will be heard," he said gruffly. "That voice will be Iñigo, my cousin's son from the province, come to the city to be my secretary. Do you understand?"
And just like that, Iñigo was born. My father became my co-conspirator. He provided the space, the protection, and the audience. I provided the mind. Our trusted majordomo, Manuel, and my lady's maid, Liza, were brought into the secret out of necessity—they were the ones who helped me transform and kept the secret from my mother.
Mama never suspected. She saw that I was clever, yes, and would often boast that her daughter was "sharper than a bolo knife," but she attributed Iñigo's cleverness to my father's shrewd training of a poor relative. She lived in a world where such a thing was possible. The truth—that her daughter was the source—was beyond the realm of her imagination.
And then, there was the locket.
It was my grandmother's final gift to me, given on my sixth birthday, the very day the fever took her and the memories of Sol crashed into my young mind. It was old, its silver filigree worn smooth by generations of touch. The design was strange, not quite Spanish, not quite indigenous—swirling patterns that seemed to tell a forgotten story.
For years, it was just a pendant. A comfort. A connection to the one person who had loved me without expectation in this new life.
The discovery happened by accident. I was thirteen, frustrated after a afternoon of being told what I couldn't do because I was a girl. I was clutching the locket, wishing with all my might that I could just be somewhere else. Anywhere else.
The world didn't spin. It… blurred.
Suddenly, the scent of sampaguita was gone. The air was cool, dry, and smelled of lemon polish and… electricity.
I was standing in the grand foyer of my villa in Forbes Park. My villa. From my life as Sol. Everything was exactly as I'd left it. The sleek modern furniture, the art on the walls, the silent hum of the air conditioning. I stumbled through the rooms, my heart pounding with a terror and joy so intense I thought I would die. My library. My kitchen. My bedroom.
I ran outside, through the sliding glass doors, and stopped. The world just… ended. Beyond the meticulously landscaped gardens of my villa was not the Manila skyline, but a soft, pearlescent gray nothingness. My villa, my warehouses—all of it—existed like a diorama in a void. A self-contained pocket dimension.
I explored further. The warehouses weren't just full of pharmaceuticals. One was stacked with non-perishable food from my charity foundation: sacks of rice, canned goods, bottled water. Another held supplies from my other businesses—reams of paper, boxes of pens, simple tools, even a section of jewelry from a failed boutique venture. It was all here. Frozen in time. And I found the most miraculous thing of all: if I took something, a box of antibiotics, a bottle of water, it would be replenished the next time I returned. The dimension wasn't just a storage unit; it was self-sustaining.
This wasn't just a secret. It was power. An unimaginable, terrifying power. I had the resources of a modern mogul at my fingertips, hidden behind a piece of silver jewelry.
I never told my father about this. Some secrets were too big to share, even with him. The locket became my deepest self, my true identity. Sol the CEO, Ines the debutante, Iñigo the secretary—they were all roles. But the woman who stood in that silent, modern villa, that was the core of me. The bridge between worlds.
And as I stood there, being pinned into a gown for a ball that felt like a auction, I knew that locket was the key. It wasn't just a connection to my past; it was the tool to change my future. Their future. Our future. The question was no longer if I would use it, but how.